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"Stop it!" said McGuire. "You're a heathen."

"I wasn't more than six—so big——"

"Are no older now. An' less civilised!"

She ran aside with beskirted clumsiness to a flowering tree, soiling her gloves and snatching at sprays, getting her hat twisted and awry in the branches; then put the sprays in the litter for Paullen to smell. He smiled at her.

"Your hat is spoiled!" said McGuire, with an air of satisfaction.

They came up into the grounds, and though it was a bright, warm day, gloom and dilapidation that was like a chill, as if the place had taken on something of old Combe's puttering shiftlessness, pervaded everything.

On three sides of the immense old house a wide veranda ran under a covering of thatch; and this shut out light from the rooms that were always dark, and where voices and footsteps resounded with echoing hollowness. The second story was thrust among palms; their leaves fumbled like blind men's fingers against the roof, and at times of storm beat ragefully, as if the blind men had lost patience. One of the veranda posts was broken, and the roof sagged. The bottom steps that led on to the veranda had long ago rotted. Trees locked their branches and laced their leaves together, as if to keep the sun from finding out what went on below. An echoing emptiness answered their voices, even outside the house. A shout through a doorway, to rouse up whoever might be there, was like a voice down a rain-barrel.